Games: Crazy Car Championship

Crazy Car Championship sees players building spectacular hybrid vehicles from weird and wonderful components in a driving game that has been described as "Jules Verne meets Flash Gordon in The Cannon Ball Run".

Races take place upon a series of flying islands and the game sees everything from steam-powered hovercrafts to quantum powered hot-rods competing in a no holds barred power-up-fest where frenetic gameplay and stunning scenery vie for the player's attention.

Crazy Car Championship is the first game to use Synaptic Soup's multi-format Cipher engine. Cipher has been built from the ground up to take advantage of the current and next wave of gaming hardware. It is geared towards delivering high-tech, high-impact titles across multiple platforms in the minimum of time.

“We were very impressed by how well positioned Synaptic Soup were to take advantage of our leading edge technologies and how fast they were able to turn our discussions into demonstrable software with their Cipher engine.” said Kevin Strange, Developer Relations Account Manager for NVIDIA.

“Cipher gives our artists all the control they could need over the look of a game via a high level shader language. When we realised that the GeForce3 would be able to hardware accelerate almost all of the operations that can be performed in this language we were extremely excited”, says Rik Heywood, Technical Director for Synaptic Soup. “Since the GeForce3 is able to accelerate so much of our graphics pipeline, it frees up a lot of other resources to providing better audio, AI and gameplay. We have been able to increase the number of computer controlled cars in Crazy Car Championship to create a more action packed game. We have also been able to add in loads of extra visual effects that simply would not have been possible before the GeForce3.”